For years people have been jailbreaking their iOS devices to run things that Apple won’t allow, whether it be apps or themes. They’ve never actively done a lot against the jailbreaking community, until now.

I’m due to take my iPhone into the Apple Store due to some hardware issues, but of course I was running a jailbroken iOS 4.3.2, so I spent 3 hours trying to restore it. It got stuck in a constant restore cycle. I tried using RecBoot, TinyUmbrella and iRecovery to try and get it out of it but it just wouldn’t work.

Turns out that Apple have now updated iTunes to check the hosts file on the computer and if there is an entry under ‘gs.apple.com’ it will put your device into a constant restore cycle. This is because some of the tools used for jailbreaking will add the ‘gs.apple.com’ entry to the hosts file to stop the local machine talking back to the server. Of course it’s simple to remove the entry and restore but for whose who don’t know about this will be stuck with a very expensive paperweight. It does rise some other issues, some people may have very large host files and therefore it will simply take too long and then iTunes will assume the device is jailbroken and put it into the constant recovery cycle.

The news has been floating around the internet for a few days now that the white iPhone 4, would finally go on sale and it’s now official. Vodafone UK among others are set to release the white iPhone 4 along with Apple themselves. The official Apple site got updated just after midnight to reflect the arrival of the white iPhone 4 model. Hopefully this also means that there will be no delay in the upcoming next generation white iPhone.

One of the smaller announcements from todays event is FaceTime now has it’s own app for Mac and although it’s in beta it works just like you’d expect. It imports your contacts and then allows you to call either their phone number or email address of the other device and will attempt to call them. I’ve tried calling my MacBook from my iPhone 4 and vice versa and it both cases it worked flawlessly. The best thing is there is nothing to set up it’s just ready to go straight away. Hopefully we will see this technology being deployed in Windows and Linux soon but for now if your on a Mac and know someone with a FaceTime capable device then install it now and give them a surprise call.

In the last few hours a big disruption in the jailbreak scene with the release of limera1n, the untethered jailbreak from geohot. That’s right the same geohot who left the jailbreak scene after he kept getting pestered by people about jailbreak releases. Over the last 6 months, geohot has been working on the jailbreak for the last 6 months. On the website, over at limera1n.com, it says that it’s unpatchable and that it will work on the iPad, iPod Touch 3G, iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPod Touch 4G on the firmware 4.0 and above. This jailbreak is in beta and so is very messy and so MusleNerd of the Chronic Dev-Team has said on Twitter to wait for the release of greenpois0n.

The limera1n jailbreak is only currently avaliable for Windows but geohot is working on a Mac & Linux version of the software. There have been a few reported issues with the jailbreak so far such as the 3GS new bootrom not being supported. The release comes a day before The Chronic Dev-Teams release of their untethered jailbreak greenpois0n, which uses a different exploit.

Currently it’s not known what The Chronic Dev-Team will do as they have 3 options available to them, they can either: not release greenpois0n and save the exploit, release the greenpois0n jailbreak and use a second exploit or use geohot’s exploit and then possibly break the ETA of 10:10:10 10/10/10 GMT.

It seems that geohot has done thing on purpose but has released in a sense, an incomplete solution just to spite The Chronic Dev-Team and their efforts. The Chronic Dev-Team are still talking at this point and trying to come to a decision of what to do, the best decision in most peoples opinion would be for them to implement the limera1n exploit and keep the SHAtter exploit for future releases.

If your thinking of using the limera1n release please know that the iPhone Dev-Team and The Chronic Dev-Team were not involved in it’s creation and therefore any issues caused by it shouldn’t have to be fixed by them as it’s geohot’s software which he choose to release in beta. I would recommend waiting for the greenpoison release, it may take a few more days but at least you’ll know all the issues will be fixed. I’ll keep everyone updated on the happenings in the jailbreak scene, make sure to check back frequently for any updates.

Update: The Chronic Dev-Team have chosed to release the greenpois0n jailbreak tool using geohot’s exploit and not the SHAtter exploit.

Due to college work I’ve been unable to update the blog as much as I’d like and although I have been updating the R5 release dates, I haven’t been posting news posts recently. Once this main work is done I should have some more time to write. I do plan on doing some video review of apps just to try something new and maybe written reviews too.

I now have an iPhone 4 so I do plan, once the greenpois0n jailbreak is released to release some retina display ready winterboard themes. I’m also tempted to start my own repo and include themes, wallpapers, ringtones etc.

I’ll try to keep you all updated as much as possible and if you have any ideas or suggestions please leave a comment or get in touch via twitter.

So today when Apple released iOS 4.1 everyone thought that it’d bring the new social gaming platform, Game Center to all recent devices except the iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2G. Turns out that Apple is supporting the second generation iPod Touch but still not the iPhone 3G. Not quite sure as to the reasoning, except to make money but I don’t think Game Center requires recent hardware as it’s just a social gaming platform.

Apple announced iOS 4.1 which fixes many of the issues that were causing major issues, fixing the issues with the proximity sensor, Bluetooth and the iPhone 3G performance along with completely new features such as HDR camera mode. Also HD video uploads over WiFi, Game Center and TV show rentals. Look for the update to hit iTunes sometime next week as a free download for your iPhone or iPod touch.